Finding Light in Darkness

We have gained 8 hours of light since my last post. We are now in the season of Spring/Winter in Minnesota. A time of lengthening daylight, birdsong, mud, crusty snow, state basketball tournaments, first burgers on the grill, bicyclists’ return to gritty streets, walks after dinner, and the first chives poking up. Daylight savings time has awakened us, to slough off winter and its quieter, sedentary ways.

An invitation to recalibrate our rhythm of waking, sleeping, eating and engaging. 

This year my birthday fell on the lunar eclipse when the moon slips into Earth’s shadow, taking on a deep reddish hue often called a “blood moon.” It represents a time of change, transformation, and inner reflection. I take this as positive sign for the coming year.

I think about the circular nature of time, how we travel around the sun measuring one year of our lives, as well as the daily spin of light and darkness in one single day.  We count on this orbital order, as a universal truth, a life-giving arrangement with the Sun, our brightest and warmest source of light. At my grandchildren’s preschool each of the students’ birthdays are celebrated with a special song “The earth goes round the sun, the earth goes round the sun, the earth goes round the s-u-u-n and (name) is one, and so on, for each year of life.  When you are five, the verses don’t get too repetitive, but 69??  

In the early Roman calendar, March was considered the first month of the year and would have been marked by a full moon.  On the Gregorian calendar, the “Ides of March” on the 15th, is associated with religious observances and celebrations, also misfortune and doom. Julius Cesar’s assassination, in 44 BCE, is forever memorialized with the words,” Beware the Ides of March” in William Shakespeare’s play. Other events have been tied to this ominous date. The SARS-Co-V-2 virus was declared a world health emergency. In my own personal history, March 15th was the date when everything closed down, hospitals so overwhelmed, my surgery for breast cancer was postponed.  Today, even our local weather forecast uses the cautionary phrase to warn us of “bluster and slush.”  I heeded #theidesoftrump to write postcards to the White House expressing my distress over the rapid-fire changes that have overwhelmed and upended us. The daily paper has become a source of fear and dread, but also a call for action. But what? How?     

I want to suggest that we exercise a tinier but powerful source of light we all carry, the light we carry within. 

Many spiritual practices emphasize the importance of cultivating an inner light – the spark of divinity within everyone.  Envision a single flame, its glow permeating the darkness, and once passed to another, illuminates a larger and larger space.  In Christianity, Jesus is the “light of the world,” a symbol in the lighting of the Paschel candle on the Easter Vigil. I will never forget watching the Holy Fire being ignited in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. (I was not in Jerusalem but watching from home.)  Thousands of pilgrims, Christians of all denominations gather as torch bearers to carry the light home, spreading the sacred flame across the world. Beeswax candles bundled with cord are swiftly ignited from what had been a dark tomb, now alive with flame, passed one to the other that erupts in a swirling tower of fire, illuminating the entire church.

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her memoir, Learning to Walk in the Dark, argues that we need to move away from our “solar spirituality” and ease our way into appreciating “lunar spirituality” (since, like the moon, our experience of the light waxes and wanes). “Through darkness we find courage, we understand the world in new ways, and we feel God’s presence around us, guiding us through things seen and unseen. Often, it is while we are in the dark that we grow the most.”

What can I learn from being in the dark? And how can I use this inner light of mine to do good?

Edith Wharton said, “There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

Imagine the tiny sparks we give off in our connections with others when we smile, make eye contact, act with kindness. These can be bright points like stars in the nighttime sky.  Light is a sign of hope, let’s not give up on it. Light is associated with love, peace, wisdom—let’s practice these.

Darkness cannot dispel light; however, the faintest glow can illuminate the darkest places.